Sierra Leone: Mining Boom Brings Rights Abuses

(Freetown) – The government of Sierra Leone and a mining company that
is the country’s largest private employer have undermined
villagers’ access to food and prevented workers from
challenging abusive practices, Human Rights Watch said in a
report released today. The government should ensure that
economic development projects in the booming post conflict
nation do not come at the expense of the human rights of
local populations.

The 96-page report, “Whose
Development?: Human Rights Abuses in Sierra Leone’s Mining
Boom,” documents how the government and London-based
African Minerals Limited forcibly relocated hundreds of
families from verdant slopes to a flat, arid area in
Tonkolili District. As a result, residents lost their
ability to cultivate crops and engage in income generating
activities that once sustained them. Police carried out a
bloody crackdown in the town of Bumbuna in April 2012 to
quell a protest by workers who went on strike after being
barred from forming a union of their own choosing.

“With
investors flocking to Sierra Leone, the government has an
opportunity to promote development for its desperately poor
population,” said Rona Peligal, deputy Africa director at
Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “But the
African Minerals Limited case shows that, unless the
government puts a stop to mining operation abuses, the
people who most need to benefit from development will be
excluded from it.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed close
to 100 people in Sierra Leone for the report, and researched
the operations of African Minerals Limited over an 18-month
period, beginning in July 2012. Human Rights Watch met with
the company’s leadership in February 2013, and
corresponded with these directors until their departure from
the firm in August. In January 2014, Human Rights Watch
wrote to the company’s new management to update findings
and request information, but has received no reply.

Sierra Leone is an impoverished West African country
still recovering from a catastrophic civil war that ended in
2002. African Minerals Limited, which began mining diamonds
in Sierra Leone in 1996, built its Tonkolili mine on what is
regarded as one of the largest deposits of magnetite in
Africa, a type of iron ore. The company exports the ore to
steelmakers in China.

The Sierra Leonean government, while
promoting the company’s operations as essential to Sierra
Leone’s economic development, permitted corporate actions
that violated the rights of Tonkolili’s residents, Human
Rights Watch found. For example, the government failed to
provide adequate oversight of the company’s consultations
with local communities or respond to repeated complaints
about the forced relocation of residents. Both the
government and the company misled villagers about what would
happen once they were moved to the new site.

“The
company went to the paramount chief, and the paramount chief
told us what to do. We asked so many questions. What they
told us they would do, they have not done.… It was a
trap,” one village elder told Human Rights Watch. “They
said, ‘It will be paradise for you,’ but it’s
completely different.”

The government also did not take
action in response to apparent African Minerals Limited
violations of Sierra Leone labor laws concerning employment,
termination, and benefits for its workers. The
government’s narrow reading of national labor law as well
as political wrangling denied the company’s workers the
ability to form a union of their choosing, rather than
belong to an established union that the workers regarded as
ineffectual.

The government of President Ernest Koroma,
re-elected in 2012, is aggressively pursuing an “Agenda
for Prosperity,” supported by bilateral donors, the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and
corporations attracted by the country’s mineral riches and
fertile land. The strategy has yielded high rates of growth;
in 2012, Sierra Leone’s economy grew by 21 percent, the
fastest in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the IMF.

That
growth, however, has not necessarily been matched by
improved living conditions for Sierra Leone’s six million
people, Human Rights Watch said. The country has ranked as
one of the poorest in the world for many years, according to
the United Nations Development Programme’s Human
Development Index. Corruption and the lack of transparency
interfere with Sierra Leone’s progress. The Extractive
Industry Transparency Initiative in February 2013 suspended
Sierra Leone’s bid for membership after the government
failed to sufficiently address discrepancies in recording
revenue or payments by companies.

“Is the growth going
to foster corruption and sow conflict?” one Sierra
Leonean, then working for a development agency, said. “The
whole point is to improve the lives of citizens. If that
doesn’t happen, then what’s the point?”

Human Rights
Watch recommendations to the government include
to:

• Provide sufficient resources for the Labor
Ministry to oversee and inspect labor conditions throughout
the country and allow multiple unions within the same
industry;

• Put into effect Sierra Leone’s new law on
access to information and publicize all mining
contracts;

• Clarify the role of paramount chiefs in
questions of land administration and ensure that the pending
land law is transparent and equitable; and

• Provide
immediate relief to the people who have been forcibly
relocated by large-scale land investments, and put in place
long-term measures to remedy negative human rights impacts
of relocation, particularly concerning access to food,
water, and livelihoods.

The government should ensure that
state land is allocated transparently and in accordance with
the rights of its occupants, and allow residents to obtain
accurate information – without fear of reprisal – on the
deployment of the country’s resources, Human Rights Watch
said.

Sierra Leonean authorities should also meaningfully
address longstanding human rights problems such as
corruption, opaque governance, unrestrained security forces,
lack of clarity in land ownership, and abuses of authority
by powerful local chiefs.

“Protecting the rights of all
Sierra Leoneans is not an option, but a legal obligation,”
Peligal said. “Particularly given Sierra Leone’s history
of conflict, promoting rights as part of the country’s
sustainable development is
essential.”

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